Meg Whitman, former chief executive officer of eBay, defended her decision to buy Skype in a radio interview with KTKZ’s Capitol Hour featuring Eric Hogue. Whitman is running for the office of the Governor of California on a Republican ticket, and is currently leading in the Republican primaries. Here is what she had to say on the show.
Hogue noted that “one of your opponents, Steve Poizner, referred to the fact that it was you as CEO of eBay that spent $2.1 billion on Skype, and that didn’t work, and he’s drawing the comparison here. Is that a fair or unfair comparison here, Meg?” She answered:
You know, we made so many acquisitions at eBay, so many of which were absolutely terrific. PayPal, a lot of our classified sites. And actually I think Skype will prove to be a good acquisition for eBay. You probably read that the company just sold about two-thirds of the interest in Skype to an investor group, kept a portion, and got almost all the money back, and I think Skype will be very effective. So I am very proud of my tenure at eBay. You know we took eBay from 30 individuals, 30 employees to 15,000, from $4.7 million in revenues to nearly $8 billion in revenues. So I’m very proud of the record and proud of the acquisition record.
I commend her for riding the eBay rocket ship, but when it comes to Skype, we all know she blew it. And once again, she dodged the question. How can she defend overlooking and not buying the JoltID technology from Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis? That decision cost eBay another 5 percent of Skype when the auction giant had to settle with the two co-founders.
Broadcom is hoping to lower the price of high-definition VoIP services by taking its BroadVoice codecs open source. But even if this move lowers the price for HD voice, will consumers pay even a marginal premium for a better quality call?
The Irvine, Calif.-based company’s BroadVoice family of voice codecs comprises two variants: BroadVoice32 for wideband speech sampled at 16 kHz, and BroadVoice16 for narrowband telephone-bandwidth speech sampled at 8 kHz. Both will be made available as C source code in an effort to lower the price for broadband operators looking to upgrade the audio quality of subscribers’ calls.
Higher-quality calls are a good thing, of course, and may be a selling point for service providers looking to stand out from the crowd. (Whether they can actually save wireline is far from certain, though.) But quality has often been a less-important feature for consumers, as cell phones (with their mobility) and VoIP (with their lower cost) have demonstrated. Broadcom’s move to open source may result in cheaper HD voice services, but until those prices are nearly indistinguishable from traditional services HD is likely to remain a small market.
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The research and writing about stress management began in 1993. Originally, I was an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), then a Field Training Officer (FTO), and I was a 911 Senior Operations Supervisor for several years.
During 1997 and 1999, while obtaining my Masters in Counseling, I was interning as a Counselor at the University Counseling Center. My focus became Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM). Subsequent to gaining Certification I became a Peer Counselor. Soon after designing a CISM Program for the largest ambulance company in the United States, I became the CISM Coordinator, and trained the Peer Counselors in the Southern Pacific Region.
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“What do we, as a society, value more: business rights or education rights?
Because we’re more and more often hearing stories about IP law effecting things like text book answers, lesson agendas, syllabi, etc. It seems that we are so wrapped up in the idea of personal rights and personal walls around the content that we create or organize that we’re losing sight of some truly important values, none more so than the ability to educate our emerging leaders to their fullest. After all, what could do more to promote the progress of our society and way of life as a whole than to educate our masses to the fullest? What standing could one possibly have to impede another’s education to eke out further profit?”
Indeed. For quite some time it’s appeared that there’s a bit of a conflict in the basics of copyright and the concept of education — which is all about sharing information and spreading that information. It’s one of those things that copyright maximalists (especially the ones who are professors) usually don’t like to talk about.
The paper reviewed here is ‘Somatic Awareness in the Clinical Care of Patients with Body Distress Symptoms’ by Bakal and colleagues and freely available here. The authors describe Body Distress Symptoms thus
‘Symptoms of somatic or body distress (BD), more widely known as medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) or functional somatic syndromes, are characteri(s)ed by patterns of persistent physical complaints for which adequate examination does not reveal specific pathology’
Thus the authors equate Medically Unexplained Symptoms, functional somatic syndromes and symptoms of body distress in their definition. The authors go on to justify their favouring of the term BD and cite evidence suggesting that reattribution therapy which attempts to move the explanation for functional bodily symptoms to a psychological cause does not lead to an improvement in outcome measures. However the article is concerned with BD rather than RT meaning that the efficacy of RT would be explored in more detail in a systematic review which may result in more complex conclusions. The authors then go on to discuss the origins of Bodily Distress Disorder (BDD), discussing the three factor model and then focusing on how core symptoms might relate to the regulation of breathing.
I disagreed with the section on ‘depression and sadness in context’. While it is important to distinguish between ‘normal’ sadness and depression (for which there are many diagnostic criteria) the authors also make some suggestions about prolonged antidepressant use and then finish the section by stating that they do not think that antidepressant treatment is the answer. I would argue on the other hand that appropriate treatments are made only after a carefully considered assessment and that recommendations regarding the optimal treatment strategies should be guided by this individual assessment, the evidence base and the local treatment protocols.
The authors answer some of these points in their section on tacit knowing and somatic awareness. Even here I would argue that they are discussing an area which includes the clinician’s intuition and that where this is carefully honed it should be consistent with related areas such as the clinical evidence base. I would argue that the clinical evidence base is not an area distinct from clinical accumen but is an investigation of clinical data and an attempt to draw meaningful knowledge from this area. The definition of ‘tacit knowledge’ adds an air of mystery by referring to knowledge at the periphery of attention. Within this section, the authors refer to non-verbal material which the physician may use during the clinical process. Such ‘tacit knowledge’ can be systematically converted into explicit knowledge by a close study of such phenomenon and indeed various methods for measuring such factors have long since been developed and employed both in clinical practice and research.
I found the discussion of somatic awareness to be a more interesting contribution if we consider the mind to be both a function of brain as well as being better described by a symbolic system that differs from that used in discussion of the ‘brain paradigm’ (e.g. see here). I was interested however to find out a little more about how the authors intended to align ‘neurobiology’ and ‘consciousness’ as according to the paradigm discussed in the previous sentence this might not be a suitable starting or indeed end point. The authors invoke some of Damasio’s thoughts on the mind-body relationship. My interpretation of what the authors were trying to say was that there is mind-brain-body relationship and that as the body is involved in this relationship it can serve as the focal point for discussions and that this is just as valid as making the mind or the brain the focal points. The justification for this would be that any ‘focal’ point is in itself a simplification of the more complex relationship that occurs between the three and so it doesn’t matter which of the triad serves as this focal point it will still be a simplification and explanations will always return to the complex interactions between mind, body and brain. However by using the body as a focal point for this discussion, the model is apparently made more accessible.
In the final section the authors consider how ’somatic awareness’ might be incorporated into medical practice. Again I disagreed with many of the points in this section. For instance, the withdrawal of medication was difficult to justify as patients may be on a number of medications for different conditions. Although some may not be prescribed as psychotropics they may in some cases have such side-effects and it would be useful to see the management suggestions in such cases where withdrawal is not possible. As above, a blanket statement about medications does not address the complexities of individual needs and even on a theoretical basis there are many counters to this suggestion. Encouraging a focus on introspection and monitoring both symptoms and bodily sensations seems to be a useful approach that could be developed further in a subsequent article again with reference to the evidence base.
In summary, the authors broach psychosomatic issues by consideration of ‘body distress’ although I found a few statements that seemed axiomatic and could be argued to be too simple to address the complexities of individual needs without careful consideration of process, the evidence base and consequences. It is useful however to have discussions in this area.
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Well, the spirit of giving arrived a little early this year! For my birthday last month, Google announced it was partnering to offer free Wi-Fi on all Virgin America flights until January 15th. Great, thanks Google, now I have to check the feeds even while flying at 500MPH. But I guess that wasn’t enough kindness to satisfy the Goog.
They’ve just announced that they’re going to be extending the free Wi-Fi to 47 entire airports. And not only that, but there’s a raft of giveaways, charity matching, and other nonsense in the bargain as well. I’m starting to think that it’s not “Don’t be evil” so much as “Give away enough stuff that people forget about the evil.” Maybe that’s disingenuous. In fact, I’m sure it is. Oh well, ’tis the season for moral ambiguity.
Here are the details, as briefly as I can state them.
All airports on this list have Wi-Fi right now. Except Sea-Tac, which is getting it later (just my luck).
Google will match any donation (up to $250K) made via the Wi-Fi in one of the airports. The airport that has the most donations on January 15 will get a $15,000 credit to donate to a local charity of their choice.
The service is provided by “Boingo, Advanced Wireless Group, Time Warner Cable, Electronic Media Systems, Lilypad as well as numerous airports that provide wireless services themselves.” i.e. Google is just paying the bill, everything else is the same.
No data is being collected besides the donation data (you’re not a guinea pig).
At some point you’ll be able to submit a photo of yourself via the Wi-Fi in order to enter for a prize drawing. Okay…? That’s kind of weird. I guess “Don’t be creepy” isn’t in the Google charter.
Sounds good to me. If anyone finds a catch, let us know, but I think it’s pretty straightforward. More info at the Free Holiday WiFi page, if you’re interested or feeling FAQ-y.
This week brings the 2009 Wise Traditions Conference hosted by the Weston A Price Foundation – and I’ll be blogging live from the conference. The conference will cover sustainable farming practices, traditional diets, radical medicine, alternative approaches to cancer and infertility as well as myriad other topics focused on just how nourishing foods can help us to heal our bodies and our planet. If you can’t join us, you can still keep up to date on the conference, its lectures and fabulous meals in real time by checking in here at Nourished Kitchen, Hartke is Online, Cheeseslave and Kitchen Kop.
Highlights of the Wise Traditions Conference
Friday: Traditional Diets, Gut and Psychology/Physiology Syndrome, Radical Medicine, What Every Grass-based Farmer (and Consumer) Should Know, Cooking, Sacred Foods, Live Blood Analysis and Film Screenings.
Saturday: Honoring Sacred Foods, Artisanal Farming with Livestock, Behind the Fuzzy Logic of Raw Milk Opposition
Sunday: Healing with Traditional Foods, Plant Food Toxins, Holistic Cancer Treatments, Real Food Economics and Lifestyle, Farm Direct: the New Face of Marketing and Distribution
Speakers: Speakers will include Sally Fallon Morrell, RJ Ruppenthal, Chris Masterjohn, Baden Lashkov, Scott Gryzbek and others who have made notable strides in the traditional and sustainable foods movements.
Real Food: What excites me the most is the food. Lunches of artisanal cheeses and sourdough breads. Suppers featuring wild-caught salmon and grass-finished meats.
Updating the Post Schedule for Wise Traditions
Wise Traditions begins this Friday and ends Sunday – so this week I’m deviating from the norm to bring you new posts directly from the conference, its lectures and events on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of this week. We’ll resume our regular Monday through Friday posting schedule on Monday, November 16th. Over the course of these three days, each post will focus on a single aspect of the conference. For up-to-the-minute action, please consider finding me on twitter and facebook where I’ll be posting videos, photographs and details of the conference in real time.
Follow the Conference Live on Twitter and Facebook
Tweet Chat: Keep it simple and checkout Tweet Chat – a service that allows you to follow specific conversations on twitter as they occur. Type in the hashtag #wapfconf which will keep you in the loop about every tweet discussing the Wise Traditions Conference as it occurs. If you have a specific question to ask or comment to make about our experiences at Wise Traditions, ask it here and you’ll get an answer in real time. It doesn’t get any more live than this!
Facebook: Don’t forget, we’ll also be updating Facebook with links, photos, videos and status reports throughout the conference. Friend me on Facebook to keep fully updated about the conference and its progress. Don’t forget to friend Ann Marie, Kimberly and Kelly – each of whom will also be covering the conference live on facebook.
Attending the Conference
Attend the Conference Virtually: Don’t forget that we’re attending this conference in person not only to further our interests and knowledge about traditional foods, health and healing, but also to share our experiences at the conference with you – our readers. So, if you can’t make it, spread the love: chat us up! Tweet, retweet and share these posts and updates as they go live! You can even download conference handouts and even recipes.
Attend the Conference in Person: If you’re planning to attend the conference in person, please stop by the Real Food Media booth while you’re there. Tee-shirts, bags and other goodies will be available for sale while and there may be a giveaway or two up our sleeves. Indeed, I’ve got a recipe cards available for free to any reader who stops by the booth and asks. We love to meet our readers and anyone who has a passion for real food.
Don’t forget: if you live within driving distance of Chicago, plan to attend the conference if only for a single day. Day passes are available for $75, not including food.
More from Nourished Kitchen
Looking for grass-finished beef or wild-caught fish? What about that exotic sourdough starter you’ve been after? Or water kefir grains? Check out the Nourished Kitchen Where to Buy List that outlines great companies that sell or support real and traditional foods.
Don’t forget: I’m not a doctor, I’m a mom who loves preparing wholesome, natural foods for her family and I enjoy sharing our reasons in choosing these nourishing foods. Read the disclaimer and advertising/link policy and the privacy policy.
2009Nov10: The 11 countries that comprise The Climate Vulnerable Forum announce that they will voluntarily commit to achieving carbon-neutrality. They also call on wealthy countries to give 1.5% of their GDP for climate action in the developing world. Bangladesh, Barbados, Costa Rica, East Timor, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Maldives, Nepal, Philippines, Rwanda, Vanuatu, and Vietnam comprised the group of 11 (ENS).
Image Description: Illa de Bandos, North Male Atholl, Maldives; foto feta per J. Ollé el juiol del 2006. Image Location: Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bandosisland.jpg Image Permission: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one.
While we’ve discussed how extreme views in the open source community can, at times, rival the way the entertainment industry acts towards those who violate licenses, reader Nick Coghlan writes in to point to an article that highlights how different they are in many cases, with Bradley Kuhn, the technical director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), putting forth new guidelines that encourage people not to jump to conclusions when they see potential violations, and to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone they suspect of violating the license. Compare that to the tens of thousands of threat letters sent out by the RIAA, at times with little real evidence.
Nokia smartphone loyalists that feel S60 is a bit long in the tooth and are looking for something new should be all smiles today, as earlier Nokia announced that the Maemo 5-powered N900 smartphone has begun shipping out after a series of delays. To officially retail for around 500€ ($749 USD), the N900 has been spotted on various US-based websites for well under $600. And that’s a darn good deal, too, because you’re not going to find many phones at that price that offer up the following:
Maemo 5 OS
3.5-inch WVGA (800 x 480) resistive touchscreen display
110.9 × 59.8 × 18mm, 181g
Portrait-orientation sliding QWERTY
Mozilla-based browser, full Adobe Flash support
ARM cortex A8 processor
32GB internal memory
5.0 MP Carl Zeiss camera with dual-LED flash, auto-focus and sliding cover
MicroSDHC support up to 16GB
FM transmitter
Quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE, WCDMA 900/1700/2100, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP
GPS
1320 mAh battery
One word of caution: as it currently stands, the N900 will not play nice with the new SIMs from 3 in the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark and Austria, although a software update to resolve this comparability issue is due out before the end of the year. A launch video from Nokia is lying in wait after the jump.
Logitech, a Swiss maker of peripherals for computers and digital consumer devices, is buying 6-year-old Austin, Texas-based video conferencing device maker LifeSize Communications for $405 million in cash. LifeSize has raised $80 million in funding from Norwest, Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Pinnacle Ventures. It makes high-definition video conferencing systems that use standard broadband connections and IP technologies to connect distributed offices and locations. The deal will put Logitech in direct competition with Cisco Systems in the hotly contested video conferencing equipment market.
LifeSize is a competitor to Cisco Systems and Tandberg, a Norwegian video conferencing company that Cisco wants to buy for some $3 billion. LifeSize currently has over 9,000 customers and is sold across the world. In a previous post, Stacey pointed out that Cisco’s Telepresence gear “provides an immersive HD experience, is expensive, and is aimed squarely at the high end of the market, where it competes with services such as HP’s Halo. Tandberg gear, on the other hand, is cheaper and aimed at the middle market.”
Tandberg’s biggest competitor is LifeSize. Logitech also owns SightSpeed, a software-based video conferencing product that works with most PC cameras. While SightSpeed and Skype are good for low-end, free video conferencing, most companies want something larger, but don’t want to spend millions. LifeSize fits into that sweet spot, which is why I liked them in the first place.
I first wrote about LifeSize in 2005, when the company was being incubated inside the offices of Norwest Venture Partners, LifeSize’s biggest investor. Norwest partner Vab Goel is a co-founder of the company that’s spearheaded by Craig Malloy. As part of the deal, Malloy will stay at the helm of LifeSize, which will in turn become a division of Logitech.
I was impressed by the company and what it had been able to do. “Using off-the-shelf components, and adding some magical software sauce, these guys have worked out a way to stream HD signals over a one-megabit-per-second connection. I think these are the types of applications which are going to push the demand for broadband,” is what I wrote at the time.
The video conferencing market has exploded since then. Cisco in particular has been touting its vision of telepresence. In his column for GigaOM, Cisco CEO John Chambers said: “High-speed networking enables new human collaboration at a profound level, and such collaboration will radically change the way we think.” Video is part of that change, which is why he spending billions of dollars trying to buy Tandberg.
After several weeks of delay for the release of Firefox 3.6 Beta 1, you might say the Mozilla team had some ground to make up. Flying squarely in the face of any commercial company that says it gets bogged down with so much user feedback, the organization accelerated the release of the public Beta 2, in response to 190 major issues with Beta 1 detected and reported by a multitude of users.
Betanews has only had the public Beta 2 up for the last hour, so we can’t draw too many conclusions just yet. What we are noticing is that the browser’s general responsiveness to the user seems smoother and snappier than the current stable version 3.5.4 (our tests on 3.5.5 are pending). While any 3.5 version is worlds more reliable than version 3.0, running ordinary tasks in Google Chrome appears noticeably faster, if not to a stopwatch than to our eyes. Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 appeared to have more of its game face on, and Beta 2 would appear to have its pants zipped up and its shirt tucked in.
For reasons we never quite discovered (and that we’d be willing to accept had more to do with Betanews.com than Firefox), the new Ctrl+Tab thumbnail preview feature had difficulty rendering the Betanews front page in Beta 1. That problem seems to have disappeared in Beta 2, so our thumbnail now shows up in miniature in the Windows 7 taskbar and in the new Ctrl+Tab selection pane.
We haven’t yet run Beta 2 through every benchmark test on every platform, but we’ve just completed an early round of tests on Windows 7. So far, Beta 2 is the best performing Firefox we’ve ever tested, overall. On our new CRPI 2.2 scoring system, it registered a score of 14.63, compared to a 24.63 score for our most recent test of the stable Google Chrome 3 (not a typo there, the difference is exactly 10 points). Our last test of stable version 3.5.4 scored 13.88 on Win7 (we’ll test stable 3.5.5 soon).
But not everything is faster with Beta 2; there are certain elements of its execution profile that are somewhat faster, and others that are somewhat slower. For example, our tests show that Beta 2 is faster at loading pages, and at accessing that first element of the page, but not necessarily at getting that critical onLoad() JavaScript event fired. That event has been a secret to Apple Safari’s success. The faster that event loads, the faster the browser can start executing code even while the remainder of the page is still downloading and being rendered. Beta 2 scored an 8.69 in our CSS rendering test on Windows 7 versus 3.5.4’s 10.48, which may be an indicator of the effect of bug fixes — maybe more stable, but slower. But Beta 2 scored a 4.38 on loading everyday pages versus 3.5.4’s 2.96; and Beta 2 scored 5.81 on rendering old-style HTML tables versus 3.5.4’s 4.27.
Mozilla looks like it’s concentrating on improving those elements that everyday users see and feel without a stopwatch (or without Betanews calculating everything to the n-th degree), and it’s making headway there.
There are obvious changes to the calculation profile, suggesting changes in the JavaScript engine, perhaps for reliability and security. If you look at the speed of individual methods and instructions unto themselves, it’s improved nicely: 43.50 in Windows 7 on the TestWorld instructions test versus a Firefox 3.5.4 score of 41.92. However, put those instructions to work with algorithms, and those faster instructions don’t scale up the same way: Beta 2 scored a low 7.46 on the new JSBenchmark classic algorithmic test battery, while 3.5.4 scored a 9.14.
Still, the overall score for Beta 2 is a few tenths of a point higher than for Beta 1, suggesting that Mozilla’s making the right tradeoffs. The organization has not publicly announced Beta 2’s availability at the time of this writing, though a confirmed public Beta 2 build was downloadable from Mozilla’s servers. Yes, we tested to make certain this wasn’t a Release Candidate masquerading as a public beta (it’s happened before). “Private” preview builds of 3.6 Beta 3 are already available.
Damn you, Best Buy and double damn you, PayPal. Why must you tempt me so?
If you have a PayPal account and you use it to make a purchase of $100 or more at BestBuy.com, you’ll get $20 loaded back into your PayPal account “2-3 weeks after the end of the promotion.” Think of it as a lazy man’s rebate. The promotion ends next Monday, November 16th.
Don’t be surprised if MySpace experiences a big traffic spike on Monday, November 16th. The social network intends to host a live stream of red carpet arrivals at the world premiere of The Twilight Saga: New Moon.
In one sense, this could have been something of a cheap trick; it’s a good bet that boatloads of young girls would tune in even if they could only catch a glimpse of Robert Pattinson and listen to a random correspondent babble. MySpace is demonstrating its influence and taking things quite a bit further, though, offering fans an exclusive experience.
According to an official statement emailed to WebProNews, "Viewers will . . . be able to take part by posting comments or questions to The Twilight Saga: New Moon Premiere MySpace page that may then be presented to the celebrities during the broadcast."
What’s more, "Anya Marina, writer and performer of ‘Satellite Heart’ on The Twilight Saga: New Moon Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, will co-host the broadcast."
So consider passing word of the event along to any relatives or friends who are Twilight fans. And with respect to what sort of traffic numbers MySpace might see, it should interest even the franchise’s biggest detractors to know that the New Moon trailer received a whopping 4.2 million views within 24 hours of its debut on MySpace.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Razer stuff. But this Abyssus mouse hearkens back to their earlier days when they were hocking two-button, ambidextrous ball mice for premium prices and only a few people took them really seriously. Now, obviously, for some, this super-basic mouse might be a good thing, but really, for $50 you can get a Death Adder (recently upgraded), G500, or any number of premium mice that are probably just as comfortable, and far more capable, than this one.
http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-mice/razer-abyssus/
The real problem is that their sensitivities are in hardware switches on the bottom; that can be good, but one of the strengths of Razer mice is their on-the-fly sensitivity, which allows you to dynamically adjust the software sensitivity at any time, to a high degree of precision. That’s not present here. If you really need a stripped-down mouse, there are plenty out there, and I’m sure the Abyssus is great, but for your money, there are better options.
It’s official — following several tweets today from Adobe employees, a company spokesperson confirmed for us that Adobe “filed an 8-K this afternoon [that] reports a company restructuring which will result in a 9 percent reduction in the company’s work force (approximately 680 employees).” You can read the filing here.
“Adobe is restructuring its business to align costs with its fiscal 2010 operating plan and budget, the company’s three-year strategic priorities and the realities of the business environment, as well as to ensure its ability to continue investing in long-term growth opportunities,” the spokesperson continued. The advisory we received also noted that at the close of its acquisition of Omniture, Adobe reduced the Web analytics firm’s work force by 9 percent.
These are tough times for some folks in the software industry. Adobe’s announcement comes right on the heels of Microsoft laying off 800 employees.
In other parts of the world, it’s become acceptable for governments to simply ignore drug patents in order to produce more of necessary drugs in times of health scares. However, the US has mostly shied away from doing that, as the myth of patents as some great encouragement for innovation remains deeply rooted (and, oh yeah, pharmas are big campaign funders). However, with growing concern over the lack of supply for swine flu vaccines, there is some talk over whether or not the US will consider importing generic Tamiflu, even though the drug is still under patent in the US. There are approved generics, which are chemically identical, that are made elsewhere, such as India. However, importing it into the US, while it could save lives, is bound to be massively controversial. However, again, if we’re going to have a moral discussion about intellectual property, can someone please explain the moral argument for not being able to use generic drugs in this instance?
A federal grand jury in Atlanta has indicted eight East Europeans on charges of hacking into a computer network operated by the credit card processing company RBS WorldPay, the U.S. Department of Justice said today.
The 16-count indictment alleges the group used sophisticated hacking techniques to compromise data encryption used by RBS WorldPay to protect customer data on payroll debit cards. Payroll debit cards are used by some companies to pay their employees.
The hacking ring allegedly raised the account limits on compromised accounts, and then provided a network of "cashers" with 44 counterfeit payroll debit cards, which were used to withdraw more than $9 million from more than 2,100 ATMs in at least 289 cites worldwide, including cities in the U.S., Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan and Canada. The $9 million loss occurred within less than 12 hours.
The hackers then attempted to destroy data on the card processing network to hide their hacking activity. The indictment alleges that the "cashers" were allowed to keep 30 to 50 percent of the money, but sent the rest back to the leaders of the hacking ring.
"The charges brought against this highly sophisticated international hacking ring were possible only because of unprecedented international cooperation with our law enforcement partners, particularly between the United States and Estonia," said Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division Lanny A. Breuer.
"Through our close cooperation, both nations have demonstrated our commitment to identifying sophisticated attacks on U.S. financial networks that are directed and operated from overseas and our commitment to bringing the perpetrators to justice."
Some of the hackers if convicted in the U.S. could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.
Remember a few days ago when I hinted at some exciting Tekken news? No? Well, today I can reveal what I was talking about: thanks to the fine folks at Namco Bandai (its publicists, to be exact) we now have three Tekken art books to give away. You can win one! This will be a very easy contest, believe me.
What do you have to do to win the art book? Just leave a comment right here in this post. I’m running this contest, so I’m not going to make you do anything ridiculous. The contest will run through the weekend, and I’ll announce the winners on Monday.
So to recap:
• You can win one of three Tekken art books. That means three people will win. Each book contains drawings, sketches, etc. of the game’s characters. You know, an art book.
• Leave a comment IN THIS POST to be considered. I’ll run the comments through a random number generator on Monday (comment number one is 1, comment number two is 2, etc.) to select the winners. Presumably we’ll have more than three entrants.
• The contest runs till Monday, November 16 at noon EST.
• You need to be a U.S. resident. I’m not paying $8 million dollars to ship this stuff to Manila or Curitiba. Sorry.
Click the link below to see an awesome video slideshow that highlights our two current projects, the Teach Out! site visits and Our Food, Our Right: Recipes for Food Justice – activist guide and recipe book. Great job to Molly Woodring and Laura Brady for working on this together!
Meg Whitman, former chief executive officer of eBay, defended her decision to buy Skype in a radio interview with KTKZ’s Capitol Hour featuring Eric Hogue. Whitman is running for the office of the Governor of California on a Republican ticket, and is currently leading in the Republican primaries. Here is what she had to say on the show.
Logitech, a Swiss maker of peripherals for computers and digital consumer devices, is buying 6-year-old Austin, Texas-based video conferencing device maker 
It’s official — following several tweets today from Adobe employees, a company spokesperson confirmed for us that Adobe “filed an 8-K this afternoon [that] reports a company restructuring which will result in a 9 percent reduction in the company’s work force (approximately 680 employees).” 
"The charges brought against this highly sophisticated international hacking ring were possible only because of unprecedented international cooperation with our law enforcement partners, particularly between the United States and Estonia," said Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division 
